Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

What is S3?

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), provides developers with
secure, durable, highly-scalable object storage. Amazon S3 is easy to use, with a
simple web
services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web.
With Amazon
S3, you pay only for the storage you actually use. There is no minimum fee and no
setup cost.

Key Concepts

Bucket

Every object you store in Amazon S3 resides in a bucket. You can use buckets to group
related
objects in the same way that you use a directory to group files in a file system.
Buckets have
properties, such as access permissions and versioning status, and you can specify
the region where
you want them to reside.

Objects

Objects are the data that you store in Amazon S3. Every object resides within a bucket
you create in
specific AWS region.

Objects stored in a region never leave the region unless you explicitly transfer them
to another
region. For example, objects stored in the EU (Ireland) region never leave it. The
objects stored in
an Amazon S3 region physically remain in that region. Amazon S3 does not keep copies
or move it to
any other region. However, you can access the objects from anywhere, as long as you
have necessary
permissions.

Objects can be any file type: images, backup data, movies, etc. An object can be as
large as 5 TB.
You can have an unlimited number of objects in a bucket.

Before you can upload an object into Amazon S3, you must have write permissions to
a bucket. For
more information on setting bucket permissions, see Editing Bucket Permissions in the S3 Developer
Guide.

User metadata – Never processed by Amazon S3. User metadata is stored with the object and
returned with it. The maximum size for user metadata is 2 KB, and both the keys and
their values
must conform to US-ASCII standards.

Project Setup

Prerequisites

Create an S3 Bucket

Amazon S3 stores your application's resources in Amazon S3 buckets - cloud storage
containers that
live in a specific region. Each Amazon
S3 bucket must have a globally unique name. You can use the Amazon S3 Console to create a bucket.

On the Edit Permissions page, enter the settings shown in the following image, replacing the
Amazon Resource Name (ARN) with your own. The ARN of an S3 bucket looks like
arn:aws:s3:::examplebucket/* and is composed of the region in which the bucket is located
and the name of the bucket. The settings shown below will give your identity pool
full to access
to all actions for the specified bucket.

Click the Add Statement button and then click Next Step.

The Wizard will show you the configuration that you generated. Click Apply Policy.